I don't understand where all the sympathy child molestors comes from. Probably from people who have never been effected by it. Perhaps if it were their children who were molested they would change their tune. I can't stand how some people are more respectful of the criminal than the victim.

Now, let's look at the other side of the fence, instant sex society, you've got STD's all around, herpes and all sorts of fallout when it comes to having sex with anyone or the wrong person. Just think, why are there so many STD's around if having a promiscious sex life is so great? The Bible really has it head on - having one person to live with your life where you have sex together and build a family is the way to go.

A: Because religion is bad and it is a lie, it is un true. Religion has slowed mankind down again and again and we all will be better off when only a few follow any religions.

If one feels that Atheists are proselytising(spelling?) their beliefs, and it bothers you, maybe it is a wake up call where one gets a taste of their own medicine, and see's how annoying and obnoxious it feels.

The Dangerous Atheism of Christopher Hitchens and Sam Harris
By Chris Hedges, Free Press. Posted March 22, 2008.

From demonizing Muslims to believing we can use science for our own moral advancement, the New Atheists preach a dangerous faith. Tools

I flew to Los Angeles in May of 2007 to debate Sam Harris, the author of The End of Faith and Letter to a Christian Nation, in UCLA's cavernous Royce Hall. I debated Christopher Hitchens, who wrote God is Not Great, two days later in San Francisco. I paid little attention, until these two public debates, to the positions of the new atheists, writers that also include Richard Dawkins and Daniel Dennet. Those are many people of great moral probity and courage who seek meaning outside of formal religious structures, who reject religious language and religious ritual and define themselves as atheists. There are also many religious figures that in the name of one god or another sanctify intolerance, repression and violence. There is nothing intrinsically moral about being a believer or a nonbeliever.

These New Atheists attack a form of religious belief many of us hate. I wrote a book called American Fascists: The Christian Right and the War on America. I am no friend of Christian radicals. We dislike the same people. We do not dislike them for the same reason. This is not a small difference.

The New Atheists embrace a belief system as intolerant, chauvinistic and bigoted as that of religious fundamentalists. They propose a route to collective salvation and the moral advancement of the human species through science and reason. The utopian dream of a perfect society and a perfect human being, the idea that we are moving towards collective salvation, is one of the most dangerous legacies of the Christian faith and the Enlightenment. Those who believe in the possibility of this perfection often call for the silencing or eradication of human beings who are impediments to human progress. They turn their particular good into a universal good. They are blind to their own corruption and capacity for evil. They soon commit evil, not for evil's sake but to make a better world.

I started Harris' book when it was published but soon put it aside. His facile attack on a form of religious belief I detest, his childish simplicity and ignorance of world affairs, as well as his demonization of Muslims, made the book tedious, at its best, and often idiotic and racist.

The liberal church, attacked by the atheists as an ineffectual "moderate" religion and by the fundamentalists as a "nominal" form of Christianity, is, as their critics point out, a largely vapid and irrelevant force. It may not support the violent projects of apocalyptic killing championed by atheists such as Harris or Hitchens and these Christian radicals, but it also does not understand how the world works or the seduction of evil. The liberal church is a largely middle class, bourgeoisie phenomenon, filled with many people who have profited from industrialization, the American empire and global capitalism. They often seem to think that if we can be nice and inclusive everything will work out.

There is nothing in human nature or human history to support the idea that we are morally advancing as a species or that we will overcome the flaws of human nature. We progress technologically and scientifically, but not morally. We use the newest instruments of technological and scientific progress to create more efficient forms of killing, repression and economic exploitation, and to accelerate environmental degradation. There is a good and a bad side to human progress. We are not moving towards a glorious utopia. We are not moving anywhere.

Religious institutions, however, should be separated from the religious values imparted to me by religious figures, including my father. Most of these men and women frequently ran afoul of their own religious authorities. Religion, real religion, was about fighting for justice, standing up for the voiceless and the weak, reaching out in acts of kindness and compassion to the stranger and the outcast, living a life of simplicity, finding empathy and defying the powerful. It was about caring for the other. Spirituality was not defined by "how it is with me," but the tougher spirituality of resistance, the spirituality born of struggle, of the fight with the world's evils. This spirituality, vastly different from the narcissism of modern spirituality movements, was eloquently articulated by Dr. King and the Lutheran minister Dietrich Bonhoeffer, who was imprisoned and put to death by the Nazis.

Many of these atheists, like the Christian fundamentalists, support the imperialist projects and preemptive wars of the United States as a necessity in the battle against terrorism and irrational religion. They divide the world into superior and inferior races, those who are enlightened by reason and knowledge and those who are governed by irrational and dangerous religious beliefs. Hitchens and Harris describe the Muslim world, where I spent seven years, most of them as the Middle East bureau chief for the New York Times, in language that is as racist, crude and intolerant as that used by Pat Robertson or the late Jerry Falwell. They are a secular version of the religious right. They misuse Darwin and evolutionary biology, just as the Christian fundamentalists misuse the Bible, by trying to argue that we can evolve morally -- something Darwin never asserted. They are as anti-intellectual as the Christian Right.

And while the atheists do not have much power and are not a threat to the democratic state, they engage in the same chauvinism and call for the same violent utopianism of the radical Christian Right. They sell this under secular banners, but this does not excuse it. They believe, like the Christian Right, that we are moving forward to a paradise, a state of human perfection made possible by science and reason. They argue, like these Christian radicals, that some human beings, maybe many human beings, have to be eradicated to achieve this better world.

Harris, echoing the blood lust of Hitchens, calls, in his book The End of Faith, for a nuclear first strike against the Islamic world. He defends torture as a logical form of interrogation. He, like all utopians, has reduced millions of human beings and cultures he knows nothing about to primitive impediments to his vision of a better world.

"What will we do if an Islamist regime, which grows dewy-eyed at the mere mention of paradise, ever acquires long-range nuclear weaponry?" Harris asks. "If history is any guide, we will not be sure about where the offending warheads are or what their state of readiness is, and so we will be unable to rely on targeted, conventional weapons to destroy them. In such a situation, the only thing likely to ensure our survival may be a nuclear first strike of our own.

Needless to say, this would be an unthinkable crime -- as it would kill tens of millions of innocent civilians in a single day -- but it may be the only course of action available to us, given what Islamists believe." Harris reduces a fifth of the world's population to a vast, primitive enemy. He blithely accepts that we may have to murder "tens of millions of people in a single day." His bigotry, and the bigotry of all who dehumanize others, sets the stage for indiscriminate slaughter and atrocity. The people to be killed, we are told, are not really distinct individuals. They do not have hopes and aspirations. They only appear human. They must be destroyed because of what they represent, what lurks beneath the surface of their human form. This dehumanization, especially by those who live in a society with the technological capacity to carry out acts of massive industrial slaughter, is terrifying. The new atheists see only one truth -- their truth. Human beings must become like them, think like them and adopt their values, which they insist are universal, or be banished from civilized society. All other values, which they never investigate or examine, are dismissed as inferior.

http://www.alternet.org/rights/80449/

I'm just still trying to figure out why it seems so monumentally important to so many athiests on here to "convert" people to their way of thinking. Seems that if you were convinced you were right, you'd be content to let others be blissful in their ignorance. But there is never a sense of agreeing to disagree. It's always as if they must keep pressing until you see it their way.

You're obviously not a country person or you wouldn't have an issue with it.

You ask repeatedly for a means to "opt out"; are given one (home schooling) and yet you continue to criticize those who don't align themselves with your cause.

IF we are going to extend the time spent in school, then it SHOULD be MANDATORY for those performing below grade level, and OPTIONAL for those who are already successful.

This sentence is representative of something very alarming that has been going on recently. A fixation on fear of the man in power. Death panels. Wanting to indoctrinate school children. Taking children from their parents. Want other examples? Many remarks in this thread are downright shocking to read.

What motivates these irrational fears? What prompts presumably educated citizens to be so riddled with misguided anger?

It makes me sick to my stomach whenever I hear discussions about the relationship that this fear-mongering might have to racism. Yet... once I fight off the nausea I must acknowledge that the situation does in fact wreak a bit of hate. What, other than hate, can elicit such irrational fear? I believe that racism is at the root of this on several levels. However, I don't think every person feeding into the nonsense is racist; I'm certainly not saying that. I believe some are simply feeding into it because their leaders say they should. And now it has taken on a life of its own.

I guess, in the grand scheme, it is a good sign. Change is often painful, awkward, ugly. I believe these are our nation's growing pains as we moves towards equality. We'll get past it, I'm sure. But it is difficult to watch.

More school: Obama would curtail summer vacation

WASHINGTON – Students beware: The summer vacation you just enjoyed could be sharply curtailed if President Barack Obama gets his way.

Obama says American kids spend too little time in school, putting them at a disadvantage with other students around the globe.

"Now, I know longer school days and school years are not wildly popular ideas," the president said earlier this year. "Not with Malia and Sasha, not in my family, and probably not in yours. But the challenges of a new century demand more time in the classroom."

The president, who has a sixth-grader and a third-grader, wants schools to add time to classes, to stay open late and to let kids in on weekends so they have a safe place to go.

"Our school calendar is based upon the agrarian economy and not too many of our kids are working the fields today," Education Secretary Arne Duncan said in a recent interview with The Associated Press.

Fifth-grader Nakany Camara is of two minds. She likes the four-week summer program at her school, Brookhaven Elementary School in Rockville, Md. Nakany enjoys seeing her friends there and thinks summer school helped boost her grades from two Cs to the honor roll.

But she doesn't want a longer school day. "I would walk straight out the door," she said.

Domonique Toombs felt the same way when she learned she would stay for an extra three hours each day in sixth grade at Boston's Clarence R. Edwards Middle School.

"I was like, `Wow, are you serious?'" she said. "That's three more hours I won't be able to chill with my friends after school."

Her school is part of a 3-year-old state initiative to add 300 hours of school time in nearly two dozen schools. Early results are positive. Even reluctant Domonique, who just started ninth grade, feels differently now. "I've learned a lot," she said.

Does Obama want every kid to do these things? School until dinnertime? Summer school? And what about the idea that kids today are overscheduled and need more time to play?

http://news.[blocked]/s/ap/20090927/ap_on_re_us/us_more_school

Marriage is about working together--how often have we wanted to divorce someone with whom we work at our jobs? If more people had the concept of working it out--like we do on the job--then perhaps there would be fewer divorces.

This coming from a divorcee seems odd?

Traditional marriage is for those who want it. Marriage does not mean you have to stay together for life. Many including friends of mine did not have traditional "vows" which mentioned staying together through this and that...they made vows that were personal to them as a couple and will TRY to honor those. They are not naive enough to think that no matter what they should stick together...

What parents should be teaching their children is that there is no good reason to get married. Kids are slowly figuring this out as married people are now the minority, but if kids were properly taught the dangers and pitfalls of marriage they would be equipped to avoid it. A large enough number of unmarried people could help to spark changes in the laws that make marriage such a terrible idea.

I think it's stupid, because then, by logic, every time I beat off, I would have killed more people than Stalin.

Love this country, but it lacks greatly in justice and freedoms to protect ourselves. At times I think the national emblem should change to a naked cartoon character bending over ...

But in a statement posted on her Facebook account, she suggested that she had bigger plans and a national agenda she planned to push after she resigns July 26.

That must make chocolate eater druggies too, oh and let's not forget about you coffee drinkers, oh wait there must be more.
Great another thread about how non smokers showing their intelligence and intolerance of others.
Sorry but I guess I must be allergic to judgemental people.

This has kind of gotten off topic, but I have to say that society does seem to "pick on" people who are obese more than, say, people who drink too much. Because we can SEE the "flaw" more easily, and then attribute it to character flaws. With drinkers, we often say, "Poor guy is an alcoholic", but a fat guy is a "poor slob with no self-control." I'm not accusing anyone on here of anything, but slim people can have hidden "flaws" that would be far harder to deal with than extra poundage. A fat person could be a totally motivated go-getter, but have a difficult time losing weight--and still will be accused of being "lazy".

They harangued eezee so bad he took his picture down. I'd like to ask them if they're proud of themselves for kicking someone when they're down.

I'd love to be there when they "get theirs".

I am "obese" because I have decided that when I am at my idea weight I look like the equivalent of a traffic light. It's got nothing to do with intestinal fortitude.

I for one, eat less than anyone else I know, yet I'm still big. Yes I need more exercise, yes I need to eat even more healthily than I do now, but I'm just wondering why it is people seem to think we all gorge ourselves like food is going out of style....oh well...we all have our preferences, likes, dislikes, apparent hatred and ignorant misinformed opinions.

Is there anything sillier than being a supporter of a third party?

This is what I'm talking about. Today most people make EXCUSES and they bull*hit themselves so much they actually believe its true.